QSpace Community: Art History program of the Queen's Art Departmenthttp://hdl.handle.net/1974/117
Art History program of the Queen's Art Department

2015-03-31T20:50:08ZSITE SPECIFIC PRACTICES AND CITY RENEWAL: The Geo-Politics of Hotel Installations in Urban Spaceshttp://hdl.handle.net/1974/12754
Title: SITE SPECIFIC PRACTICES AND CITY RENEWAL: The Geo-Politics of Hotel Installations in Urban Spaces
Authors: Veitch, Michelle
Abstract: This dissertation examines site specific works produced in hotel buildings by exploring the multiple and contending narratives which gave meaning to city spaces where divergent communities lived, worked and socialized. I analyze the ways in which artists altered urban sites on a visual, sensorial and perceptual levels by focusing on installations produced in three hotels from 1980 to the present: the Embassy Hotel in London, Ontario, and the Cameron House and the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto, Ontario. By facilitating critical interventions in these architectural spaces, artists responded to the conflicting agendas of varying constituencies—from city planners and artists to hotel owners and residents. These commercial establishments, which combined bars, cafés, performance venues, galleries and room rentals, demonstrate the ways in which art and cultural production reflect broader social patterns and urban life: economic shifts, questions of diversity, activist struggles, consumerism, unemployment, and community. In addition to providing spaces for creative practices and art installations, the hotels each went through a series of renovations, transforming the once derelict buildings where low income tenants formerly resided into gentrified buildings, thus changing the social, symbolic and historical significance of the architectural sites. Working across these complex socio-spatial patterns creative communities re-envisioned urban geographies through contemporary art practices which impacted how and why people perceived, conceived and experienced the surrounding environment. By producing and exhibiting works in city spaces artists participated in urban regeneration in the local neighborhoods of London and Toronto; yet this was necessarily coupled with gentrification, and the displacement of local residents (including creative communities and people living in poverty) who could not afford rental increases. I evaluate the critical aesthetics shaping site specific installations by drawing attention to the contradictions and tensions underlying city revitalization which concurrently enabled and disenabled community formations. I argue that artists contended with the geo-politics of identification, dis-identification, belonging and unbelonging by negotiating differing subject positions through which tenants and workers made claims to property rights and ownership. They produced what Michel Foucault referred to as “heteropias” by representing, contesting and inverting the hotel sites, thus creatively and critically engaging with – rather then simply supporting or opposing – the paradoxical possibilities of urban regeneration (Foucault, "Of Other Spaces", 24).
Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2010-02-18 11:46:10.7122015-02-23T05:00:00ZEverything (Old was New) Already: Theories, Histories, and Politics of Appropriation, Contemporary Art, and Culturehttp://hdl.handle.net/1974/12676
Title: Everything (Old was New) Already: Theories, Histories, and Politics of Appropriation, Contemporary Art, and Culture
Authors: Symko, RIVA
Abstract: The past decade and a half of technological innovation and explosion of historical multiplicities have reignited the debates on appropriation. This dissertation contributes to the discussion for the purposes of understanding appropriation’s significance to our fluctuating conceptions of authenticity and originality, and to our long-standing cultural institutions (specifically, copyright).
Critics of certain kinds of appropriation (like pastiche) have argued it is nothing more than a vague, empty form of mimicry, more closely related to theft than to creative production. On the other hand, advocates for certain kinds of appropriation (like parody, satire, or collage) have regarded it as a useful form of criticism and as a catalyst for inventing new modes of expression in a postmodern moment. Some of the most conspicuous and effecting conversations about appropriation and creative production have lately occurred in relation to intellectual property legislation. Although it is often taken for granted that copyright laws protect creative producers, this dissertation follows recent revelations in literary, and communications studies which have revealed the complex tension between these producers and the economically directed industries that are both driven by, and support those producers.
This thesis updates arguments about appropriation for a contemporary context by critically examining these claims from a postcolonial, Marxist perspective considered largely through contemporary Western visual art, film, fashion, and music. This thesis argues that it cannot be predetermined as to whether acts of appropriation are wholly laudatory, or wholly critical. Instead, I argue that appropriation has always carried the ability to oscillate between both poles in an intertextual exchange that remains dependent on the variables of the viewer’s context and the artist’s production. However, this intertextuality is often impeded by our fetishization of artists and creative works, and by the institutions that benefit from those fetishes.
Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2014-12-24 15:59:40.7552015-01-05T05:00:00ZArt and Business in Seventeenth-Century Naples: The Collecting, Dealing and Patronage Practices of Gaspare Roomerhttp://hdl.handle.net/1974/12624
Title: Art and Business in Seventeenth-Century Naples: The Collecting, Dealing and Patronage Practices of Gaspare Roomer
Authors: Lepine-Cercone, CHANTELLE
Abstract: This thesis examines the cultural influence of the seventeenth-century Flemish merchant Gaspare Roomer, who lived in Naples from 1616 until 1674. Specifically, it explores his art dealing, collecting and patronage activities, which exerted a notable influence on Neapolitan society. Using bank documents, letters, artist biographies and guidebooks, Roomer’s practices as an art dealer are studied and his importance as a major figure in the artistic exchange between Northern and Sourthern Europe is elucidated. His collection is primarily reconstructed using inventories, wills and artist biographies. Through this examination, Roomer emerges as one of Naples’ most prominent collectors of landscapes, still lifes and battle scenes, in addition to being a sophisticated collector of history paintings. The merchant’s relationship to the Spanish viceregal government of Naples is also discussed, as are his contributions to charity. Giving paintings to notable individuals and large donations to religious institutions were another way in which Roomer exacted influence. This study of Roomer’s cultural importance is comprehensive, exploring both Northern and Southern European sources. Through extensive use of primary source material, the full extent of Roomer’s art dealing, collecting and patronage practices are thoroughly examined.
Description: Thesis (Ph.D, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2014-11-26 21:30:06.9952014-11-27T05:00:00ZThe Myth of Participatory Art: An Analysis of the Contradictions Present in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present and Hélio Oiticica’s Parangoléshttp://hdl.handle.net/1974/12521
Title: The Myth of Participatory Art: An Analysis of the Contradictions Present in Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present and Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés
Authors: Benson, Rebecca
Abstract: Participatory artworks, despite the efforts of artists and theorists alike, remain commodifiable, highly profitable, and ultimately support the conception of the artist as a singular genius. These works must negotiate the paradoxes and contradictions that are inherent to their production, exhibition and dissemination. I believe that artists, participants, critics, curators and historians will be in a better position to negotiate the contradiction of participatory art once a critical intervention in the discourse has occurred—an intervention that would illuminate the fact of paradoxes, analyze the content of these paradoxes, and recognize the conditions from which such paradoxes necessarily emerge.
The aim of this thesis is to provide evidence of specific paradoxes that exist within the conception, display, marketing, and dissemination of participatory art with the hope of shedding light on the ways that participatory art is mythologized and typically represented within a narrow set of art historical paradigms. Ultimately this thesis suggests tactics for the presentation and discussion of participatory art that will acknowledge these paradoxes and provide an accurate presentation of participatory art’s processes.
My analysis rests on two case studies: Marina Abramović’s The Artist is Present, 2010, and Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés, 1965. Abramović’s The Artist is Present consisted of Abramović sitting at a table for 8 hours a day at the New York Museum of Modern Art, from March 14 until May 31, 2010. Hélio Oiticica’s Parangolés, is a series of colourful capes and costumes that were inspired and worn by the samba dancers of the Rio de Janeiro shantytown of Mangueira, as a means of freeing colour from the plane of the canvas.
This thesis articulates the ways in which art historians and theorists construct Abramović’s biography to support the notion of a singular artistic genius, while maintaining Abramović’s connection to collaborative art practices. It addresses the meaning of objects that are the byproduct of participatory works; the profitability of participatory art; the ways in which participatory art is historicized and subsumed by art institutions; and the apparent incongruity of Parangolés being attributed to a single author, despite the many types of labour required in its creation.
Description: Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2014-09-26 13:08:24.1692014-09-30T04:00:00Z